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Implementing pagination with Retrofit in Eventyay Attendee

Pagination (Paging) is a common and powerful technique in Android Development when making HTTP requests or fetching data from the database. Eventyay Attendee has found many situations where data binding comes in as a great solution for our network calls with Retrofit. Let’s take a look at this technique.

Problems without Pagination in Android Development

Implementing Pagination with Kotlin with Retrofit

Results and GIF

Conclusions

PROBLEMS WITHOUT DATABINDING IN ANDROID DEVELOPMENT

Making HTTP requests to fetch data from the API is a basic work in any kind of application. With the mobile application, network data usage management is an important factor that affects the loading performance of the app. Without paging, all of the data are fetched even though most of them are not displayed on the screen. Pagination is a technique to load all the data in pages of limited items, which is much more efficient

DataSource is a base class for loading data in the paging library from Android. In Eventyay, we use PageKeyedDataSource. It will fetch the data based on the number of pages and items per page with our default parameters. With PageKeyedDataSource, three main functions loadInitial(), loadBefore(), loadAfter() are used to to load each chunks of data.

Databinding is the way to go when working with a complex UI in Android Development. This helps reducing boilerplate code and to increase the readability of the code and the performance of the UI. One problem with data-binding is that sometimes, it is pretty hard to debug with unhelpful log messages. Hopefully, you can empower your UI in your project now with data-binding.

Pagination is the way to go for fetching items from the API and making infinite scrolling. This helps reduce network usage and improve the performance of Android applications. And that’s it. I hope you can make your application more powerful with pagination.